Awe

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The “great sayings” are not accessible to normal, secular modes of thought. They do not proceed from logic or sense perception, but can be apprehended only after a long period of training, meditation, and cultivating a habit of inwardness that transforms our way of looking at ourselves and the world. A reader who has not adopted the Upanishadic method will not be able to comprehend its conclusions. The word “Upanishad” meant “to sit down near to.” This was an esoteric knowledge imparted by mystically inclined sages to a few spiritually gifted pupils who sat at their feet. It was not for everybody. Most Aryans continued to worship and sacrifice in the traditional manner, since they lacked either the talent or the desire to undertake this long and arduous quest. The sages were exploring new ways of being religious. In penetrating the uncharted world of the psyche, they were pioneers, and only a talented few would be able to accompany them. But life was changing, and this meant that some people needed to find a spirituality to meet their altered circumstances. The first Upanishads were set in a society that was at the very beginning of the process of urbanization. 8 There is little agricultural imagery in these texts, but many references to weaving, pottery, and metallurgy. People were traveling long distances to consult these sages, which meant that transport was improving. Many of the debates took place in the court of a raja. Life was becoming more settled, and some had more leisure for contemplation. The Brhadaranyaka was almost certainly composed in the kingdom of Videha, a frontier state on the most easterly point of Aryan expansion in the seventh century. 9 Videha was scorned as an unsophisticated, newfangled place by the Brahmins in the “Land of the Arya” to the west, but there was a great admixture of peoples in these eastern territories, including Indo-Aryan settlers from earlier waves of migration, tribes from Iran (later known as the Malla, Vajji, and Sakya), as well as peoples who were indigenous to India. These new encounters were intellectually stimulating. The renouncers were also generating fresh ideas, as they experimented with their ascetic lifestyle. Certainly the two earliest Upanishads both reflect this intense intellectual and spiritual excitement.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Rabbi Akiba, who was killed by the Romans in 132 CE, taught that the commandment “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” was “the great principle of the Torah.”40 To show disrespect to any human being who had been created in God’s image was seen by the rabbis as a denial of God himself and tantamount to atheism. Murder was a sacrilege: “Scripture instructs us that whatsoever sheds human blood is regarded as if he had diminished the divine image.”41 God had created only one man at the beginning of time to teach us that destroying only one human life was equivalent to annihilating the entire world, while to save a life redeemed the whole of humanity.42 To humiliate anybody—even a slave or a non-Jew—was equivalent to murder, a sacrilegious defacing of God’s image.43 To spread a scandalous, lying story about another person was to deny the existence of God.44 Religion was inseparable from the practice of habitual respect to all other human beings. You could not worship God unless you practiced the Golden Rule and honored your fellow humans, whoever they were. In Rabbinic Judaism, study was as important as meditation in other traditions. It was a spiritual quest: the word for study, darash, meant “to search,” “to go in pursuit of.” It led not to an intellectual grasp of somebody else’s ideas, but to new insight. So rabbinic midrash (“exegesis”) could go further than the original text, discover what it did not say, and find an entirely fresh interpretation; as one rabbinic text explained: “Matters that had not been disclosed to Moses were disclosed to Rabbi Akiba and his generation.”45 Study was also inseparable from action. When Rabbi Hillel had expounded the Golden Rule to the skeptical pagan, he told him, “Go and study it.” The truth of the Golden Rule would be revealed only if you put it into practice in your daily life. Study was a dynamic encounter with God. One day, somebody came to Rabbi Akiba and told him that Ben Azzai was sitting expounding the scripture with fire flashing around him. Rabbi Akiba went to investigate. Was Ben Azzai, perhaps, discussing Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot, which inspired the mystically inclined to make their own ascent to heaven? No, Ben Azzai replied. I was only linking up the words of the Torah with one another, and then with the words of the prophets, and the prophets with the writings, and the words rejoiced, as when they were delivered from Sinai, and they were sweet as at their original utterance.46 Scripture was not a closed book, and revelation was not a historical event that had happened in a distant time. It was renewed every time a Jew confronted the text, opened himself to it, and applied it to his own situation. This dynamic vision could set the world afire.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  At the beginning of time, he had hurled his glittering, deadly thunderbolt at Vritra, the three-headed dragon who had blocked the flow of the life-giving waters, so that the earth was parched with drought. Indra had thus made the world habitable by fighting terrify-ing battles against overwhelming odds, not by feebly sitting at home like Varuna. In the Vedic texts, all the attributes of Varuna—the administration of law, the guardianship of the truth, and the punishment of falsehood—pass to Indra. But the uncomfortable fact remained that for all his glamour, Indra was a killer, who had only managed to defeat Vritra by lying and cheating. This was the violent and troubled vision of a society constantly involved in desperate warfare. The Vedic hymns saw the entire cosmos convulsed by terrifying conflict and passionate rivalries. Devas and asuras fought each other in heaven, while the Aryans struggled for survival on earth. 34 This was an age of scarcity; the only way that the Aryans could establish themselves in the Indus Valley was by stealing the cattle of the indigenous settled communities—the earthly counterparts of the stay-at-home asuras. 35 The Aryans were hard-living, hard-drinking people who loved music, gambling, and wine. But even at this very early stage they showed spiritual genius. Shortly after they arrived in the Punjab, a learned elite began to compile the earliest hymns of the Rig Veda (“Knowledge in Verse”), the most prestigious portion of the Vedic scriptures. When completed, it would consist of 1,028 hymns, divided into ten books. This was just one part of a vast corpus of literature, which included anthologies of songs, mantras (short prose formulae used in ritual), and instructions for their recitation. These texts and poems had all been inspired; they were shruti, “that which is heard.” Revealed to the great seers ( rishis ) of antiquity, they were absolutely authoritative, unmarked by human redaction, divine, and eternal. Some hymns of the Rig Veda could be very old indeed, because by the time the Aryan tribes arrived in India, its language was already archaic. The poems were the property of a small group of seven priestly families, each with its own “copyrighted” collection, which they chanted during the sacrificial rituals. Family members learned the hymns by heart and transmitted them orally to the next generation; the Rig Veda was not committed to writing until the second millennium of the common era. Since the advent of literacy, our powers of memory have declined, and we find it hard to believe that people were able to learn such lengthy texts. But the Vedic scriptures were transmitted with impeccable accuracy, even after the archaic Sanskrit had become almost incomprehensible, and still today, the exact tonal accents and inflections of the original, long-lost language have been preserved, together with the ritually prescribed gestures of the arms and fingers.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Plato shared the conviction of many Axial philosophers that there was a dimension of reality that transcended our normal experience but that was accessible to us and natural to our humanity. Yet where others believed that this insight could not be achieved by ratiocination, Plato believed that it could. But his insistence that knowledge was essentially recollection shows that this rigorous dialectic was not coldly analytic but intuitive; the recovery of this innate knowledge seemed to take the mind itself by surprise. It is true that in some of the dialogues Plato simply made use of the forms to investigate a concept or get to the root of a problem.84 But it is also true that Plato’s rational quest was passionate and romantic. In ancient Greece, reason was not “cold” but “hot,” a spiritual quest for meaning and value.85 It helped the psyche to identify its goals and harness its desires in order to attain them. Hitherto, as far as we can tell from the fragmentary texts that have survived, Greek philosophers had often confined themselves to a notional, cerebral interpretation of experience. In the Academy, Greek education became more spiritual.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Like any kind of oral transmission, the Socratic dialectic was not a purely cerebral exercise. It was an initiation. Plato’s account of these Socratic dialogues was pervaded by profound emotion that informed the ideas at every stage of the argument. Participants became aware of an aspiration that brought them to the heart of their being. There was a sense of constant striving without fanaticism or dogmatic certitude. Instead, there was a receptive, eager openness to the absolute. In the Platonic dialogue, we sense the effect that Socrates had on others. Alcibiades, the nephew of Pericles, seemed to have fallen in love with Socrates, whom he saw as a mysterious figure, appearing just when one least expected to find him. He was like the little effigies of the satyr Silenus, which, when unscrewed, had a tiny statue of a god inside. He was like the satyr Marsyas, whose music propelled the audience into a trance and made them yearn for union with the gods. But Socrates did not need a musical instrument. His words alone stirred people to the depths. “Whenever I listen to him, my heart beats faster than if I were in a religious frenzy and tears run down my face,” Alcibiades confessed. He never had this experience when listening to his uncle Pericles. When Socrates spoke, he made Alcibiades realize “that I am still a mass of imperfections.” He was the only person in the world who could fill him with shame. Socrates seemed to be a buffoon, fooling around, joking, falling in love with young men, and drinking all night long. But, Alcibiades said, I doubt whether anyone has ever seen the treasures that are revealed when he grows serious and exposes what he keeps inside. However I once saw them, and found them so divine and beautiful and marvellous that, to put the matter briefly, I had no choice but to do what Socrates bade me. The logoi of Socrates filled his audience with the same kind of “frenzy” as a Dionysian initiation; the listener felt “unhinged” (ekplexis), as though he were on the brink of illumination.41

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Because he was repeating the primal sacrifice, he had become one with Prajapati, had abandoned the profane world of mortality, and had entered the divine realm. He could, therefore, declare: “I have attained heaven, the gods; I am become immortal!” This archetypal thinking was, of course, typical of ancient thought. What distinguished the Indian ritual reform, however, was that these links were actually forged in the course of the ritual by means of a mental effort. The ritualists tried to make the participants aware of these bandhus, and thus become more self-conscious. Even the smallest implement, such as a fire stick, had to be fused in their minds with the fire stick that had been used in the primordial rite. When the priest threw clarified butter into the fire, he uttered exactly the same cry as Prajapati ( Svaha! ) when he had made this offering. By means of the mental activity of the sacrificer and the priests, these earthly objects were “perfected”; they left behind the frail particularity of their profane existence to became one with the divine. Like all ancient peoples, the Vedic Indians believed that ritual could and must repair the constantly depleted energies of the natural world. The reformers told another story about Prajapati’s creation. They explained that in the beginning Prajapati had awoken to the fact that he was alone in the universe; he longed for offspring, so he had practiced asceticism—fasting, holding his breath, and generating heat—and gradually the whole of reality had emanated from his person ( purusha ): devas, asuras, Vedas, humans, and the natural world. But Prajapati was not a very efficient progenitor and his creation was a mess. The creatures were not yet separate from Prajapati. 73 They were still a part of him, and when, exhausted by his labors, he fell into a stupor, they almost died. 74 They dropped away from him, disintegrated, and some actually fled, fearing that Prajapati would devour them. When he woke up, Prajapati was horrified: “How can I put these creatures back into myself?” he asked. 75 There was only one solution. Prajapati had to be put together again, so Agni reconstructed him, building him up piece by piece. The lost and scattered creatures regained their identity, and the world became viable. 76 Thus, by the ritual law of similarity, when the sacrificer built a new fire altar during the Agnicayana, he was really reconstructing Prajapati, and giving life to the whole of creation. Every ritual made the world stronger. 77 The reformers had replaced the old self-destructive rites with ceremonies that symbolized the building of a new world order. Gods and humans had to work together in a joint project of continuous renovation. Fundamental to the ritual reform was the conviction that human beings were fragile creatures and, like Prajapati, could easily fall apart.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Some of the ways in which Confucius interpreted tradition were radically different in emphasis. The old religion had focused on Heaven: people had often performed the sacrifices simply to gain the favor of the gods and spirits, but Confucius concentrated on this world. Like his contemporary Zichan, prime minister of Cheng, he believed that it was better to focus on what we knew. Indeed, he preferred not to speak of Heaven at all. His pupil Zigong noted: “We are allowed to hear our Master’s views on culture and the outward insignia of goodness, but about the ways of Heaven, he will not tell us anything at all.”10 Confucius was not interested in metaphysics and discouraged theological chatter. When Zilu asked him how a junzi should minister to the gods, he replied: “Till you have learned to serve men, how can you serve spirits?” And when Zilu persisted, and asked what the life of the ancestors was actually like, Confucius replied again: “Till you know about the living, how are you to know about the dead?”11 Confucius was no skeptic. He practiced the traditional ancestral rites punctiliously, and was filled with numinous awe when he thought of Heaven. Like the Indian sages, he understood the value of silence. “I would much rather not have to talk,” he once complained. Zigong was distressed. “If our Master did not talk,” he objected, “how can we little ones teach others about him?” “Heaven does not speak,” Confucius replied, “yet the four seasons run their course by the command of Heaven, the hundred creatures, each after its own kind, are born thereby. Heaven does no speaking!”12 Heaven might not talk, but it was supremely effective. Instead of wasting time on pointless theological speculation, people should imitate the reticence of Heaven and keep a reverent silence. Then, perhaps, they too would be a potent force in the world. Confucius brought the religion of China down to earth. Instead of concerning themselves about the afterlife, people must learn to be good here below. His disciples did not study with him in order to acquire esoteric information about the gods and spirits. Their ultimate concern was not Heaven but the Way. The task of the junzi was to tread the path carefully, realizing that this in itself had absolute value. It would lead them not to a place or a person but to a condition of transcendent goodness. The rituals were the road map that would put them on course.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  45 Study was also inseparable from action. When Rabbi Hillel had expounded the Golden Rule to the skeptical pagan, he told him, “Go and study it.” The truth of the Golden Rule would be revealed only if you put it into practice in your daily life. Study was a dynamic encounter with God. One day, somebody came to Rabbi Akiba and told him that Ben Azzai was sitting expounding the scripture with fire flashing around him. Rabbi Akiba went to investigate. Was Ben Azzai, perhaps, discussing Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot, which inspired the mystically inclined to make their own ascent to heaven? No, Ben Azzai replied. I was only linking up the words of the Torah with one another, and then with the words of the prophets, and the prophets with the writings, and the words rejoiced, as when they were delivered from Sinai, and they were sweet as at their original utterance. 46 Scripture was not a closed book, and revelation was not a historical event that had happened in a distant time. It was renewed every time a Jew confronted the text, opened himself to it, and applied it to his own situation. This dynamic vision could set the world afire. There were, therefore, no “orthodox” beliefs. Nobody—not even the voice of God himself—could tell a Jew what to think. In one seminal story, Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus was engaged in an intractable argument with his colleagues about a point of Jewish law. He could not convert them to his point of view, so he asked God to back him up by performing some spectacular miracles. A carob tree moved four hundred cubits of its own accord; water in a conduit flowed backward; the walls of the house of studies shook so dramatically that the building seemed about to collapse. But Rabbi Eliezer’s companions were not impressed. Finally, in desperation, he asked for a “voice from heaven” ( bat qol ) to come to his aid. Obligingly the divine voice declared: “What is your quarrel with Rabbi Eliezer? The legal decision is always according to his view.” But Rabbi Joshua rose to his feet and quoted the book of Deuteronomy: “It is not in heaven.” The teaching of God was no longer confined to the divine sphere. It had been promulgated on Mount Sinai, and was therefore the inalienable possession of every single Jew. It did not belong to God anymore, “so we pay no attention to a bat qol. ” 47 The rabbis fully accepted the Axial principle that the ultimate reality was transcendent and ineffable. Nobody could have the last word on the subject of God. Jews were forbidden to pronounce God’s name, as a powerful reminder that any attempt to express the divine was so inadequate that it was potentially blasphemous. The rabbis even warned Israelites not to praise God too frequently in their prayers, because their words could only be defective.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Once he had entered the state of trance, the yogin progressed through a series of increasingly deep mental states, which bore no relation to their usual experience. There was samadhi, a state of pure consciousness, where the sense of “I” and “mine” had completely disappeared; the yogin felt wholly at one with the objects of his meditation, and was aware of nothing else. He was certainly not conscious of himself contemplating them. There were other, more extreme states that were achieved by a very few, especially talented yoga practitioners, who could describe them only paradoxically: there was a sense of absence that was also a presence; an emptiness that was plenitude; an eternal present; a life in death. Yogins called such experience “nothingness” because there were no words to describe it; they compared it to the sensation of walking into a room and finding simply emptiness, space, and freedom. The yogins interpreted their meditative discoveries differently. Those who subscribed to the teachings of the Upanishads believed that they had finally become one with the brahman; those who followed the Samkhya philosophy claimed that they had liberated the purusha. But the basic experience remained the same. Whatever they thought they had done, the yogins had opened up new possibilities. An acute appreciation of the suffering that was endemic to the human condition had led these extraordinarily ambitious men to find a radical way out. They had evolved a spiritual technology that would free them of dukkha. Yoga was not for everybody, however. It was a full-time job that could not be combined with the demands of everyday life. But other sages would later find a way to develop a yoga that would give the laity intimations of enlightenment. M eanwhile, China was in crisis. When Chu had defeated the armies of the league of Chinese states in 597, the region became engulfed in an entirely new kind of aggression. The gloves were off. Chu had no time for the old ritualized warfare, and the other large states also began to cast aside the constraints of tradition, determined to expand and conquer more territory, even if this meant the destruction of the enemy. Warfare became very different from the stately campaigns of the past. In 593, for example, during a lengthy siege, the people of Song were reduced to eating their own children. The old principalities faced political annihilation. They knew that they could not compete with the bigger states but were drawn into the fray against their will, as their territories became a battleground of competing armies. Qi, for example, so frequently encroached on the tiny principality of Lu that Lu was forced to appeal to Chu for aid—but all to no avail. By the end of the sixth century, Chu had been defeated and Qi had become so dominant that the duke of Lu only managed to retain a modicum of independence with the help of the western state of Qin.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Athens was beginning to grow beyond tragedy, and in so doing, was also parting company with the Axial Age. The play warned the polis that it was dangerous to refuse admittance to the outsider. In Oedipus at Colonus (406), Sophocles had shown Athens receiving with honor the polluted, sacred figure of the dying Oedipus, an act of compassion that would be a blessing for the city. But in The Bacchae, Pentheus rejected the stranger and was destroyed. Not only was it politically disastrous, but individuals also had to recognize and accept the stranger that they encountered within themselves during the mystery celebrations. By giving Dionysus his due in the annual festival, Athens had given the alterity that he represented an honored place in the heart of the city; but over the years it had failed to respect the inviolable separateness of the other poleis, had exploited and attacked them, and in the process had fallen prey to hubris. In this last play, Euripides approached the heart of the Axial vision. The chorus of Maenads, the regular worshipers of Dionysus, had been correctly initiated into his cult; they experienced a vision of peace, rapture, and integration. But the women of Thebes, who were unschooled in the disciplines of transformation, were simply out of control, driven mad by the darker regions of their psyche that were unknown to them. As she entered the city, holding aloft the ghastly trophy of her son’s head, Agaue did not achieve ekstasis, but was enchanted only by her own achievements: Great in the eyes of the world, Great are the deeds I have done And the hunt I’ve hunted there.43 The apotheosis of this barren selfishness was an act of unspeakable, unnatural violence. In this play, Euripides also presented one of the most moving and truly transcendent Greek experiences of the divine. Dionysus might seem amoral, cruel, and alien, yet he was incontrovertibly present onstage, and could neither be willed nor driven away. In his human disguise as the stranger, he seemed uncanny. Dionysus had always been the masked god—the mask a constant reminder that he was other than he appeared. His supreme epiphany was not an anthropomorphic apparition but a sudden disappearance when, hiding himself from all who believed only in what they could see, he vanished abruptly from the stage. A great silence immediately descended upon earth, in which his presence was felt more strongly than ever before.44 The older Olympian vision was reaching beyond itself to the ineffable reality behind the symbols.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Any statement about God, they said, should have two qualities: it must be paradoxical, to remind us that the divine cannot fit into our limited human categories, and apophatic, leading us to silence. 77 A theological discussion, therefore, should not answer all our queries about the ineffable deity, but should be like a brahmodya, which reduced contestants to speechless awe. Centuries of institutional, political, and intellectual development have tended to obscure the importance of compassion in religion. All too often the religion that dominates the public discourse seems to express an institutional egotism: my faith is better than yours! As Zhuangzi noted, once people interject themselves into their beliefs, they can become quarrelsome, officious, or even unkind. Compassion is not a popular virtue, because it demands the laying aside of the ego that we identify with our deepest self; so people often prefer being right to being compassionate. Fundamentalist religion has absorbed the violence of our time and developed a polarized vision, so that, like the early Zoroastrians, fundamentalists sometimes divide humanity into two hostile camps, with the embattled faithful engaged in a deadly war against “evildoers.” As we have seen to our cost, this attitude can easily segue into atrocity. It is also counterproductive. As the Daodejing pointed out, violence usually recoils upon the perpetrator, no matter how well intentioned he might be. You cannot force people to behave as you want; in fact, coercive measures are more likely to drive them in the opposite direction. All the world religions have seen the eruption of this type of militant piety. As a result, some people have concluded either that religion itself is inescapably violent or that violence and intolerance are endemic to a particular tradition. But the story of the Axial Age shows that in fact the opposite is the case. Every single one of these faiths began in principled and visceral recoil from the unprecedented violence of their time. The Axial Age began in India when the ritual reformers started to extract the conflict and aggression from the sacrificial contest. Israel’s Axial Age began in earnest after the destruction of Jerusalem and the enforced deportation of the exiles to Babylonia, where the priestly writers started to evolve an ideal of reconciliation and ahimsa. China’s Axial Age developed during the Warring States period, when Confucians, Mohists, and Daoists all found ways to counteract widespread lawless, lethal aggression. In Greece, where violence was institutionalized by the polis, despite some notable contributions to the Axial ideal—especially in the realm of tragedy—there was ultimately no religious transformation. Nevertheless, the critics of religion are right to point to a connection between violence and the sacred, because homo religiosus has always been preoccupied by the cruelty of life.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Indeed, the cosmos thus created was itself a living being, with a rational mind (nous) and soul (psyche), which could be discerned in the mathematical proportions of the universe and the regular revolutions of the heavenly bodies. The stars themselves participated in the divinity of the creator; they were “visible and generated gods,” and Gaia, the Earth, was “the foremost, the one with greatest seniority”; she too had been created according to the perfect model.98 In the same way, the nous of each human being was divine; each had a daimon, a divine spark, within him- or herself, whose purpose was to “raise us up away from the earth and toward what is akin to us in heaven.”99 Human beings therefore lived in a perfectly rational world, the exploration of which was both a scientific and a spiritual enterprise. Plato had devised a new cosmic religion, which superseded the old Olympian vision and became the faith of the enlightened philosopher. It was accepted—though interpreted differently—by all Plato’s pupils, and would, once merged with the monotheistic vision, remain the basic cosmological vision of Western Europe until the twelfth century CE. Plato’s sacred universe was an inspiration to philosophers; it encouraged them to investigate the cosmos empirically and to believe that it was possible to solve the mysteries of nature. It assured them that their minds, which contained a trace of the sacred, were equipped for the task. It also brought the divine into a human frame and made it perceptible. It was possible to actually see the gods—the sun, moon, and stars—every day, shining in the sky. When they investigated the earth, scientifically, they were delving into the mystery of the divine. But Plato’s cosmic religion meant nothing to ordinary people who had no philosophical training. A deity who was uninterested in the human race could not give meaning to their lives. Plato tried to remedy this. The Olympian gods and heroes were now regarded as daimones, lesser deities who acted as tutelary spirits and carried messages to and from the ineffable celestial world. Nobody could ever have any intercourse with the supremely incomprehensible God, but they could revere Zeus, the guardian of city boundaries who took care of strangers; Hera, the patron of marriage; and Athena and Ares, who looked after hoplites during a campaign.100 The Olympians had been reduced to guardian angels,*7 similar to the nature spirits who were being phased out of the Axial religions.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  All was orderly and swift. All was straight and sure. 51 The festival was an epiphany of a sacred society, living in close proximity with the divine; everybody had his or her unique and irreplaceable role, and by leaving their everyday selves behind, they felt caught up in something larger and more momentous. The ritual dramatically created a replica of the court of Heaven, where the High God, the First Ancestor (represented by the king), sat in state with the Shang and Zhou ancestors and the nature gods. The spirits conferred blessings, but they too submitted to the rituals of the sacred drama. The Shang had used the rites to gain the good offices of the ancestors and gods, but by the ninth century, it was becoming more important to perform the rituals precisely and beautifully. When they were perfectly executed, something magical occurred within the participants that gave them intimations of divine harmony. 52 The ceremony concluded with an elaborate six-act ballet, which reenacted the campaign of Kings Wen and Wu against the last Shang king. Sixty-four dancers, clad in silk and carrying jade hatchets, represented the army, while the king himself played the part of his ancestor King Wen. Each act had its special music and symbolic dances, and hymns celebrated the establishment of the mandate: The Mandate is not easy to keep, may it not end in your persons. Display and make bright your good fame, and consider what Yin had received from Heaven. The doings of high Heaven have no sound, no smell. Make King Wen your pattern and all the states will trust in you. 53 The ballet concluded with a peaceful dance ( da xia ), which was attributed to Yu, the founder of the Xia dynasty. It symbolized good government and universal peace, and—it was believed—would magically bring order and tranquillity to the Zhou domain. The Chinese understood the importance of artifice; by acting out these intricate dramas, they felt that they became more fully humane. By the ninth century they had begun to appreciate that the transformative effect of ritual was far more important than the manipulation of the gods. By playing a role, we become other than ourselves. By taking on a different persona, we momentarily lose ourselves in another. The ritual gave the participants a vision of harmony, beauty, and sacredness that stayed with them when they returned to the confusion of their ordinary lives. During the rite, something new came alive in the dancers, actors, and courtiers. By submitting to the minute details of the liturgy, they gave themselves up to the larger pattern, and created—at least for a time—a holy community, where past and present, Heaven and Earth were one. The Chinese were only at the beginning of their journey, however. They had not yet started to reflect upon the effects of these ceremonies.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The thirteen classical Upanishads, produced between the seventh and second centuries, were accorded the same status as the Rig Veda. They too were shruti, “revealed,” regarded as scripture par excellence. They are not easy to interpret, but they have been more influential in shaping Hindu spirituality than any other part of the Vedic corpus. The two earliest Upanishads emerged seamlessly from the world of the Brahmanas . Like the Aranyakas, or Forest Texts, they were esoteric sections added onto the Brahmana commentaries of the different priestly schools. The first of the Upanishads actually called itself an Aranyaka. The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad is the “Great Forest Text” of the White Yajur Veda School. It opened with a discussion of the Vedic horse sacrifice, one of the most important of the royal ceremonies and the speciality of the White Yajur Veda. The author of the Upanishad pointed out bandhus (“connections”) in the traditional way, identifying various parts of the horse with the natural world. The stallion’s head was the dawn, his eyes were the sun, and his breath was the wind. But in the Upanishad, the ritual could be performed and completed mentally. It had ceased to be linked with a physical, external sacrifice but took place entirely in the mind of the sage ( rishi ). The Chandogya Upanishad was the Vedantic text of the Udgatr priests who were responsible for the chant, and it began appropriately with a meditation on the sacred syllable “Om,” with which the Udgatr priest began each hymn. Sound had always been divine in India; it was the primal reality, because, it was said, everything else derived from it. Now, the Chandogya Upanishad made this single syllable stand for all sound and for the entire cosmos. Om was the essence of everything that existed—of the sun, moon, and stars. It was the brahman in form of sound, the vital power that held everything together: “As all leaves are held together by a stalk, so all speech is held together by Om. Verily, the whole world is nothing but Om. ” 1 But the chant was not merely a transcendent reality external to the priest who intoned it. It was also one with the human body, with the atman, with breath, speech, ear, eye, and mind. The Chandogya Upanishad directed the attention of the audience back to the inner self. When a priest intoned this sacred syllable with these “connections” firmly in his mind, he attained the goal of the spiritual quest. Because Om was the brahman, it was “the immortal and the fearless.” 2 A person who chanted this immortal and fearless sound while contemplating these bandhus would himself become immortal and free from fear. This brings us to the heart of the Upanishadic vision.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  They also directed the patron’s attention toward his inner world. Instead of inflicting death on the hapless animal, he was now instructed to assimilate death, experiencing it internally in a symbolic rite.46 During the ceremony, his death was enacted ritually and enabled him for a time to enter the world of the immortal gods. A more internal spirituality was beginning to emerge, one closer to what we call “religion”; and it was rooted in a desire to avoid violence. Instead of mindlessly going through the motions of external rituals, participants were required to become aware of the hidden significance of the rites, making themselves conscious of the connections that, in the logic of the perennial philosophy, linked every single action, liturgical utensil, and mantra to a divine reality. Gods were assimilated with humans, humans with animals and plants, the transcendent with the immanent, and the visible with the invisible.47 This was not simply self-indulgent make-believe but part of the endless human endeavor to endow the smallest details of life with meaning. Ritual, it has been said, creates a controlled environment in which, for a while, we lay aside the inescapable flaws of our mundane existence. Yet by so doing we paradoxically become acutely aware of them. After the ceremony, when we return to daily life, we can recall our experience of the way things ought to be. Ritual is, therefore, the creation of fallible human beings who can never fully realize their ideals.48 So while the day-to-day world of the Aryans was inherently violent, cruel, and unjust, in these new rites participants had the chance to inhabit—if only temporarily—a world from which aggression was rigorously excluded. Kshatriyas could not abandon the violence of their dharma, because society depended on it. But as we will see, some began to become painfully aware of the taint that the warrior had always carried in Aryan society, ever since Indra had been called a “sinner.” Some would build on the experience of the new rituals to create an alternative spirituality that would undermine the aggressive martial ethos. But in the new segmented society, very few people now took part in the Vedic rites, which had become the preserve of the aristocracy. Most lower-class Aryans made simpler offerings to their favorite devas in their own home and worshipped a variety of gods—some adopted from the indigenous population—which would form the multifarious Hindu pantheon that would finally emerge during the Gupta period (320–540 CE). But the most spectacular rituals, such as the royal consecration, would make an impression on the public, and people would talk about them for a long time. They also helped to support the class system. The priest who performed the rites was able to assert his superiority over the raja or Kshatriya patron and thus maintain his place at the head of the body politic. In turn, the raja, who paid for the sacrifice, could invoke divine authority to extract more of the surplus from the vaishyas.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The first sign of this development can be seen in the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, the teachings of “the Sage with the white mule,” which was probably composed in the late fourth century. Traditional Vedic religion had never been very visual. Even in their heyday, nobody had been particularly interested in what Indra or Vishnu had looked like. People had experienced the divine in chants and mantras, not in statues and icons. The Shvetashvatara Upanishad is strongly influenced by the teachings of Samkhya yoga, an originally atheistic school, but here brahman, the absolute reality, was identified with the personalized god Rudra/Shiva, and it was he who would liberate the yogin from the painful cycle of samsara. When he achieved this moksha, the enlightened yogin would see the deity within himself. This was probably not a complete innovation. Vedic religion had been practiced and promoted by the upper classes, but it is possible that ordinary worshipers had always made images of the gods in perishable materials that did not survive.71 By the end of the Axial Age, this popular faith, which may have existed continuously ever since the days of the Indus Valley civilization, had begun to fuse with the sophisticated practices of the sages. In the Rig Veda, Rudra was a very marginal god. Now, merged with the indigenous god Shiva, he had come to the foreground as the personalized embodiment of brahman and the Lord of the universe, who made himself known to his devotees in the practice of yoga. The yogin could break the bonds of samsara only by becoming one with the Lord, the ruler of nature and the self (atman): “When he comes to know God, he is freed from all fetters. . . . By meditating on him, by striving toward him, and further in the end by becoming the same reality as him, all illusion disappears.”72 All impediments fell away, and at the moment of death the self was indissolubly united to Lord Rudra. The Lord was not simply a transcendent being but lived within the self, in rather the same way as the form (murti) of fire was potentially present in wood: we could not see it until the friction of the fire drill caused the flame to blaze forth. The Lord resided within us like oil in sesame seeds or butter in curds. Meditation brought the yogin into direct contact with “the true nature of the brahman,” which was no longer an impersonal reality, but the “unborn, unchanging” Rudra, the mountain dweller.73 He was even “higher than brahman, the immense one hidden in all beings, in each according to its kind, and who alone encompasses the whole universe.”74 Yet Rudra was also “the size of a thumb,” hiding within the self.75 Meditation had enabled the yogin to see the god’s physical form (murti) in the deeper regions of his personality.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  On the other hand, nothing is more congenial, from babyhood to the end of life, than to be able to assimilate the new to the old, to meet each threatening violator or burster of our well-known series of concepts, as it comes in, see through its unwontedness, and ticket it off as an old friend in disguise. This victorious assimilation of the new is in fact the type of all intellectual pleasure. The lust for it is curiosity. The relation of the new to the old, before the assimilation is performed, is wonder. We feel neither curiosity nor wonder concerning things so far beyond us that we have no concepts to refer them to or standards by which to measure them.[122] The Fuegians, in Darwin's voyage, wondered at the small boats, but took the big ship as a 'matter of course.' Only what we partly know already inspires us with a desire to know more. The more elaborate textile fabrics, the vaster works in metal, to most of us are like the air, the water, and the ground, absolute existences which awaken no ideas. It is a matter of course that an engraving or a copper-plate inscription should possess that degree of beauty. But if we are shown a pen-drawing of equal perfection, our personal sympathy with the difficulty of the task makes us immediately wonder at the skill. The old lady admiring the Academician's picture, says to him: "And is it really all done by hand?" IS PERCEPTION UNCONSCIOUS INFERENCE? A widely-spread opinion (which has been held by such men as Schopenhauer, Spencer, Hartmann, Wundt, Helmholtz, and lately interestingly pleaded for by M. Binet[123]) will have it that perception should be called a sort of reasoning operation, more or less unconsciously and automatically performed. The question seems at first a verbal one, depending on how broadly the term reasoning is to be taken. If, every time a present sign suggests an absent reality to our mind, we make an inference; and if every time we make an inference we reason ; then perception is indubitably reasoning. Only one sees no room in it for any unconscious part. Both associates, the present sign and the contiguous things which it suggests, are above-board, and no intermediary ideas are required. Most of those who have upheld the thesis in question have, however, made a more complex supposition. What they have meant is that perception is a mediate inference, end that the middle term is unconscious. When the sensation which I have called' this ' (p. 83, supra) is felt, they think that some process like the following runs through the mind: 'This' is M; but M is A; therefore 'this' is A[124]

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  One day a Brahmin found the Buddha sitting under a tree and the sight of his serenity, stillness, and self-discipline filled the priest with awe. The Buddha reminded him of a tusker elephant: there was the same sense of enormous strength and massive potential brought under control and channeled into an extraordinary peace. The Brahmin had never seen a man like that before. “Are you a god, sir?” he asked. “An angel . . . or a spirit?” No, the Buddha replied. He had simply revealed a new potential in human nature. It was possible to live in this world of pain at peace, in control, and in harmony with one’s fellow creatures. Once people had cut the roots of their egotism, they lived at the peak of their capacity and would activate parts of their beings that were normally dormant. How should the Brahmin describe him? “Remember me,” the Buddha told him, “as one who is awake.”109 8 ALL IS ONE (c. 400 to 300 BCE) By the fourth century, the economic and political transformation of China was progressing at astonishing speed. The wars continued and the princes needed to fund their expensive campaigns, so they encouraged the development of the new mercantile economy.1 In the late fifth century, the Chinese had discovered how to cast iron, and with their strong iron tools were able to clear an immense amount of forest land. By the end of the fourth century, the Wei Valley, the Chengdu basin, and the central plain were under continuous cultivation. Farmers learned to use manure, to distinguish different kinds of soil, and the best times to plow, sow, or drain the land. Harvests improved, and despite the destructive warfare, there was a rapid growth in population. A new class of merchants arose, who worked closely with the princes, building foundries and developing mines. The most enterprising merchants established large trading empires and took their goods to north Korea, the steppes, and even as far as India, trading in textiles, cereals, salt, metals, hides, and leather, and employing an ever-growing number of artisans, agents, and fleets of carts and boats. The cities were no longer simply political and religious capitals, but had become centers of trade and industry, accommodating thousands of citizens. In the feudal period, the walls of the little palace towns had measured a mere five hundred yards; now some city walls were over two miles long. In the fourth century, Linzi, the capital of Qi, was the largest city in China, with three hundred thousand inhabitants. An urban class of craftsmen and artisans, no longer tied to the royal palace, had emerged there, and the wealthy enjoyed the new luxuries and the thriving entertainment industry. The princes of Qi became patrons of the leading scholars of China, and in 357 founded the Jixia Academy beside the western gate of Linzi, where shi literati lived in well-appointed apartments on generous stipends.2

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Zhuangzi told another story about Confucius, who was traveling with his disciples through a forest and met a hunchback who was trapping cicadas with a sticky pole. To Confucius’s astonishment, the hunchback never missed a single one. How did he manage it? He had clearly so perfected his powers of concentration that he had lost himself in his task, and achieved an ekstasis, a self-forgetfulness that brought him into perfect harmony with the Way. “Do you have the Way?” Confucius asked. “Indeed I have!” replied the hunchback. He had no idea how he did it! But he had practiced for months and could now bring himself into a state in which he was wholly focused on catching cicadas: “never tiring, never leaning, never being aware of any of the vast number of living beings, except cicadas. Following this method, how could I fail?” He had left his conscious self behind and let the qi take over, Confucius explained to his disciples: “He keeps his will undivided and his spirit energized,” so that his hands seemed to move by themselves. Conscious deliberate planning would be distracting and counterproductive. The hunchback reminded Zhuangzi of the carpenter Bian, who explained: “When I work on a wheel, if I hit it too softly, pleasant as this is, it doesn’t make for a good wheel. If I hit furiously, I get tired, and the thing doesn’t work! So, not too soft, not too vigorous. I grasp it in my hand and hold it in my heart. I cannot express this by word of mouth, I just know it. I cannot teach this to my son, nor can my son learn it from me.”33 In the same way, a sage who had learned not to analyze, make distinctions, and weigh alternatives had left the “ego principle” behind, did what came naturally, and became one with the deepest and most divine rhythm of the universe.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Hesiod was a different kind of poet from Homer, and perfectly placed to assess the crisis.44 He was not a member of the warrior aristocracy, but a farmer in Boetia, and was inspired by many of the newer ideas coming from the east. His father had migrated from Asia Minor to the Greek mainland, and in some ways Hesiod seemed more at home with Near Eastern, Hurrian, or Hittite mythology than with the Greek heroic tradition. He certainly saw himself as a Greek bard and once even won a prize for his poetry, but he used the heroic formulae awkwardly and may have composed his poems in writing rather than orally.45 He was the first Greek poet to write in his own voice and put a name to his compositions. In some ways, Hesiod was more like a Hebrew prophet than a Homeric bard. Like Amos, he felt the first stirrings of divine inspiration “while he was shepherding his lambs.” The Muses, the daughters of Zeus, commanded him to speak the truth, and then Plucked and gave a staff to me, A shoot of blooming laurel, wonderful to see, And breathed a sacred voice into my mouth With which to celebrate the things to come And things which were before.46 He experienced his poetry as a revelation; it could soothe men’s hearts and build a bridge to the gods. So did the practice of social justice. This preoccupation brought Hesiod even closer to Amos. In Works and Days, a long hymn to the sacred task of agricultural labor and wise husbandry, Hesiod explained that he was involved in a dispute with his brother Perses. Their inheritance had been divided between them, but Perses had tried to get more than his share, and had brought his case before the local basileis. Hesiod had little faith in the legal system, and warned Perses that the only people who would benefit from this litigation were the aristocrats themselves, who would charge a crippling fee. Hesiod’s personal experience gave him a special insight into the agricultural crisis that was escalating into a major political dispute all over Greece. Like a prophet, Hesiod warned the basileis: You lords, take notice of this punishment. The deathless gods are never far away. . . . The eye of Zeus sees all, and understands, And when he wishes, marks and does not miss How just a city is, inside.47